Get Your FeedBurner Reader Statistic Using PHP cURL and the FeedBurner API

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My favorite part of the Web 2.0 revolution is the abundance of APIs. Everyone has one: Digg, Feedburner, Pownce, Flickr, Google Maps, etc. FeedBurner provides a sweet "Awareness API" that allows you to pull statistics from your FeedBurner account. Here's how you do it using PHP cURL.

The PHP

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?id=#######');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);  
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);

//execute post
$content = curl_exec($ch);

$subscribers = get_match('/circulation="(.*)"/isU',$content);

echo 'Subscribers:  '.$subscribers;

//close connection
curl_close($ch);


/* helper: does the regex */
function get_match($regex,$content)
{
	preg_match($regex,$content,$matches);
	return $matches[1];
}

It's that easy. What makes this even better is that I hate FeedBurner's "badge" and I can manipulate the result of the above code any way I want. Click here to learn more about FeedBurner's Awareness API and the information you can pull about your feed.

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Discussion

  1. Very nice; I would like this info, but I too hate the FeedBurner badges.

  2. Nice!! I was considering finally putting my subscriber count on my site and you just made it a bit easier. Thanks!

  3. Stuart

    Nice article, although not sure if i’ll be running it until I relaunch my blog with more than two subscribers.

  4. Nice, i try it soon. thank you.

  5. How can I use this same thing when m account is with google feedburner? feedburner.google.com

  6. Hi David,
    Can I check that if an email address is subscribed to my feeds or not?

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